Latest news with #Bitcoin2025
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Michael Saylor Says Bitcoin Is 'Engineered To Outperfom' And 'Going To Go Faster Than Gold:' Peter Schiff Says 'He Still Refuses To Debate...'
Benzinga and Yahoo Finance LLC may earn commission or revenue on some items through the links below. Strategy co-founder Michael Saylor took a dig at economist Peter Schiff on Thursday while highlighting Bitcoin's (CRYPTO: BTC) superiority over all assets, including gold. What Happened: Speaking at the Bitcoin 2025 conference, Saylor said that Bitcoin is 'engineered to outperform' all capital assets in the world. 'It's going to grow faster than the S&P, it's going to appreciate faster than gold. Sorry, Peter!' Saylor poked fun at Schiff, a long-time gold advocate. Trending: — no wallets, just price speculation and free paper trading to practice different strategies. Schiff was quick to react, taking satisfaction in the fact that Saylor recognized him as the 'world's leading' gold advocate. 'It's just too bad he still refuses to debate gold versus Bitcoin with me,' Schiff said. Why It Matters: The friendly banter comes after Eric Trump, executive vice president of The Trump Organization, praised Saylor's Bitcoin optimism and said that the cryptocurrency space is 'fortunate' to have him. Saylor, one of the most ardent supporters of Bitcoin, has put his money where his mouth is. His company Strategy is at the forefront of Bitcoin's corporate adoption, owning a BTC stockpile worth more than $61 billion as of this writing, according to Schiff, on the other hand, maintains that gold's proven track record makes it a more reliable investment. Interestingly, Schiff participated in the Bitcoin conference to represent an opposing view about the asset. Read Next: New to crypto? Get up to $400 in rewards for successfully completing short educational courses and making your first qualifying trade on Coinbase. A must-have for all crypto enthusiasts: Sign up for the Gemini Credit Card today and earn rewards on Bitcoin Ether, or 60+ other tokens, with every purchase. Photo courtesy: Shutterstock Send To MSN: Send to MSN This article Michael Saylor Says Bitcoin Is 'Engineered To Outperfom' And 'Going To Go Faster Than Gold:' Peter Schiff Says 'He Still Refuses To Debate...' originally appeared on Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
CNBC
9 hours ago
- Business
- CNBC
Saylor's bitcoin buying strategy is 'exploding' globally, but Wall Street is skeptical
LAS VEGAS — The bitcoin treasury play that lifted Strategy's market cap past $80 billion is now being mimicked by meme stock companies, media firms, and multinational conglomerates. But Wall Street isn't buying all the hype. This week, Trump Media announced plans to raise $2.5 billion to buy bitcoin, and GameStop revealed a $500 million allocation. Meanwhile, Tether, SoftBank, and Strike's Jack Mallers unveiled Twenty One, a bitcoin-native public company expected to launch with more than 42,000 bitcoin on its balance sheet, enough to make it the third-largest corporate holder of the asset globally. For now, the market doesn't see the next Strategy in any of them. Trump Media shares have dropped more than 20% since the announcement, while GameStop is down nearly 17%. Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy, has multiplied by 26 times since the end of 2022, amassing a bitcoin stake worth over $60 billion. "Maybe the market wanted them to buy more bitcoin," said Strategy Chairman Michael Saylor in an interview at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas. "But these are short-term dynamics. Over the long term, bitcoin on the balance sheet has proven to be extraordinarily popular." Saylor called Trump Media's move "courageous, aggressive, and intelligent" — and said the flood of similar announcements marks a global shift in corporate finance. "Everywhere I go at this conference, someone says, you know, I'm working on a bitcoin treasury company in Hong Kong. I'm doing this thing in Korea. I've got this thing I'm working on in Abu Dhabi. We're going to do this in the Middle East, you know, we've got this in the U.K.," he said. "There's an explosion of interest right now." Saylor said bitcoin ambassadors are "planting the orange flag everywhere on earth." What began as a fringe financial maneuver is quickly becoming a geopolitical race. Under the Biden administration, corporate bitcoin adoption was often treated as a regulatory red flag. But under President Donald Trump, the tone has changed. In March, Trump signed an executive order establishing a U.S. Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, instructing federal agencies to treat bitcoin as a long-term store of value. The reserve will be funded entirely through bitcoin seized in criminal and civil forfeiture cases, according to White House Crypto and AI Czar David Sacks. The order also empowers the government to explore additional budget-neutral mechanisms for acquiring more bitcoin. For the first time, the federal government will conduct a full audit of its digital asset holdings, currently estimated at more than 200,000 bitcoin. The order explicitly prohibits the sale of any bitcoin from the reserve, cementing its role as a permanent sovereign asset. Vice President JD Vance this week became the first sitting vice president to address the bitcoin community directly, framing crypto as a hedge against inflation, censorship, and "unelected bureaucrats." And in a further move to boost bitcoin, the Department of Labor rolled back guidance that had discouraged bitcoin investments in retirement plans. "No force on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come," Saylor said. "Bitcoin is digital capital and maybe the most explosive idea of the era." Some corners of the corporate world are still resistant. Late last year, Microsoft shareholders rejected a proposal to use some of the software company's massive cash pile to follow Saylor's lead. In a video presentation supporting the effort, Saylor told investors that "Microsoft can't afford to miss the next technology wave." While Strategy has reaped the rewards of early adoption, Saylor suggested the market's cooler reaction to Trump Media and GameStop may stem more from structural financing dynamics than from skepticism toward bitcoin itself. He pointed to GameStop's initial announcement that it was considering a bitcoin strategy, which led to a 50% pop in the stock and tenfold increase in trading volume. The company quickly capitalized on the momentum with a $1.5 billion convertible bond raise — a move he described as "extraordinarily successful." Trump Media took a similar approach, raising capital through a large convertible bond offering. Saylor said those financing methods can create short-term downward pressure, but that over time investors will benefit. When it comes to Strategy, Saylor said there's no ceiling to his bitcoin accumulation plans. His company is already by far the largest corporate holder of the cryptocurrency. "We'll keep buying bitcoin," he told CNBC. "We expect the price of bitcoin will keep going up. We think it will get exponentially harder to buy bitcoin, but we will work exponentially more efficiently to buy bitcoin." For critics who worry that state and media actors embracing bitcoin will undermine its decentralized ideals, Saylor argues the opposite. "The network is very anti-fragile, and there's a balance of power here," he said. "The more actors that come into the ecosystem, the more diverse, the more distributed the protocol is, the more incorruptible it becomes, the more robust it becomes, and so that means the more trustworthy it becomes to larger economic actors who otherwise would be afraid to put all of their economic weight on the network."
NBC News
9 hours ago
- Business
- NBC News
A cutout of President Donald Trump holding a bitcoin token at the Moonshot booth during the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday. Bridget Bennett / Bloomberg via Getty Images Crypto Trump's crypto complicates Las Vegas wedding between MAGA and bitcoin At the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas, attendees questioned the effects of Trump's meme coin.
May 31, 2025, 7:19 AM EDT By David Ingram LAS VEGAS — At bitcoin's biggest event of the year, the Trump administration was omnipresent. Vice President JD Vance was the keynote speaker at the Bitcoin 2025 conference Wednesday, President Donald Trump's sons Eric and Donald Jr. appeared on multiple panels, and a delegation of White House advisers including crypto czar David Sacks praised crypto as the future of technology. The crypto community is used to being treated with skepticism and scorn from many politicians and lawmakers. But a warm embrace from the Trump White House still hasn't erased some crypto investors' skepticism. As Trump has been loosening government oversight and regulations around cryptocurrency, he has also waded into his own crypto project: the $TRUMP coin. Earlier in May, Trump hosted a private dinner at his Washington, D.C.-area golf club for top $TRUMP coin buyers, who on average spent more than $1 million per seat and sparked widespread concern about opportunities for influence-buying. The $TRUMP coin is what industry professionals call a meme coin — meaning it offers little technical innovation or practical use and that its value is extremely volatile, relying on cultural cachet and symbolism. To many serious investors in bitcoin or other established cryptocurrencies, meme coins are seen as a hazard to the long-term success of crypto. On the conference floor, some bitcoin holders predicted that crypto novices would lose money on the $TRUMP coin, hurting the reputation of the entire industry. While many attendees liked Trump's crypto policies, they weren't sold on his coin. 'A lot of them will get burned to leave and never come back — which I think is a terrible outcome, and I don't like it,' said Seth for Privacy, the vice president of crypto wallet software company Cake Wallet. The host of a privacy podcast, he declined to share his last name and is known online as Seth for Privacy. 'Obviously, the best-case scenario would be none of that stuff exists,' he said of meme coins. He said he still hopes that $TRUMP coin and others like it could be an 'on-ramp' to bitcoin. More than 67,000 buyers of the Trump meme coin have acquired it with debit cards, a likely sign that they were crypto neophytes, according to an analysis by The Washington Post. Bitcoin investor Ryan Nichols, who traveled to the Bitcoin 2025 conference from Austin, Texas, said he's a Trump fan but wouldn't touch Trump's digital currency. 'I love Trump. I really want to see what he does to improve this country. But at the same time, I don't think his coin is going to be much better than the Hawk Tuah coin,' he said, referring to a meme coin that crashed in December and is now the subject of lawsuits. 'I think it will continue to be a pretty good investment for a few more months at most, and then probably drop,' he said. The Trump Organization and the website administrators of where the meme token is for sale, did not respond to requests for comment Friday. The White House declined to comment, saying in an email, 'The $TRUMP meme coin has nothing to do with the White House!' The price of the $TRUMP coin fluctuates. It sold for less than $1 a coin on Jan. 17, the night Trump announced it with a post on X. Within two days, it soared past $70, according to data from research site CoinGecko. Its value plunged after Trump's inauguration and has since bounced in a range from about $8 to $16 a coin. On Friday, it was trading at around $11, with a total market capitalization of $2.2 billion, according to CoinGecko. First lady Melania Trump launched a meme coin of her own, called $MELANIA, also in January. Its price has cratered from more than $13 a coin to $0.32 as of Friday, according to CoinGecko. Two Trump-affiliated companies own 80% of the $TRUMP coin project. While their ability to sell is restricted in the short term, the creators get a fee for every trade. Those fees have added up to more than $324 million since January, according to the research firm Chainalysis. The amount going to Trump personally is not known. Another conference attendee, Edan Yago, a co-founder of the startup BitcoinOS, called the $TRUMP coin a form of legal corruption and not a good use of the underlying technology. 'Trump has discovered that he can issue a token and have people buy that token. Given our current legal system, it's all fine, and so there's new forms of graft and new forms of corruption that have come part and parcel with this new technology,' he said in an interview at the conference. He compared meme coins to brothels on the edge of a gold rush. 'You always have this happen whenever there's massive growth,' he said. Audrey Geiger, another bitcoin investor, said she voted for Trump and likes that he has loosened regulations on cryptocurrency, but she said she wouldn't buy the $TRUMP coin. 'Never touched the stuff,' she said. 'I just ignore that. It's all noise. It's gambling.' The comments are a sign of a tension in the marriage between the MAGA and crypto movements. The two groups formed an alliance last year, when Trump was seeking support for his return to the White House and the crypto industry was looking for changes in federal policy. Trump had previously been a harsh critic of cryptocurrency, saying in 2021 that it 'seems like a scam,' but he flipped in the following years. He spoke at last year's bitcoin conference, made a series of promises to support crypto in office and now calls himself 'the crypto president.' Trump has made aggressive moves to deregulate the cryptocurrency industry and has vowed to launch a government-owned ' strategic reserve ' of digital currency. Fueled in part by those actions, bitcoin soared to a record high of more than $111,000 in May. 'As soon as he won the election, that set in stone that he was the face of crypto for at least the next four years,' Nichols said. Trump's coin has been widely criticized, with government ethics experts and Democratic politicians decrying it as a breach of presidential norms and a vector for possible attempts at influence-buying. Some Republican lawmakers said Trump's dinner with $TRUMP coin owners made them uncomfortable. Jason Jisa, who attended the Bitcoin 2025 conference as a vendor selling Trump-themed merchandise, said he owns bitcoin but not Trump's coin. Wearing a gold- and silver-colored sequin jacket, he said the meme coin has left him stumped. 'It's something we're all paying attention to, trying to figure it out, right? It's something new,' he said. New Hampshire state Rep. Keith Ammon, a Republican, spoke onstage at the conference about his role in creating his state's pathbreaking cryptocurrency reserve. In an interview, he said Trump's coin shouldn't be part of such a reserve fund, which under New Hampshire law is limited to digital assets with a market capitalization of over $500 billion. 'A meme coin is like a casino chip: You might get lucky on it, but it's not a long-term store of value. It's a Skee-Ball token,' he said. By contrast, he said he believes bitcoin 'is the digital version of the bar of gold.' But even as many bitcoin enthusiasts expressed frustration with Trump's meme coin, none of the conference attendees interviewed by NBC News suggested there was anything to be done about it other than to try to persuade Trump to back off. They all said they oppose federal regulation of cryptocurrency, preferring to let meme coin buyers beware. Seth for Privacy said the community needs to 'take the good with the bad.' 'If you could limit what cryptocurrencies people could launch or what meme coins could exist, necessarily you could limit what freedom use cases could exist with these things as well,' he said. At the three-day conference at the Venetian resort and casino, Trump's name, likeness and slogans were everywhere: on artwork for sale, on hats and clothing and on the lips of speakers. A Trump look-alike roamed the expo floor. And onstage, speakers reinforced the mutual benefits of the MAGA-crypto marriage. They praised Trump's overhaul of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which previously classified many digital tokens as securities under a 1933 law. And they extolled Trump's pardon of Ross Ulbricht, who in 2015 was sentenced to life in prison for running the dark web marketplace Silk Road. Prosecutors had blamed Silk Road for six drug overdose deaths, while Trump called the sentence too harsh. The White House dispatched a cadre of advisers to speak at the conference, an unusual show of force from the U.S. government at an event that's explicitly anti-government. Sacks, the White House czar for crypto and artificial intelligence, said onstage that the Trump administration had already delivered much of what the industry had on its wish list, and he solicited ideas from the audience about what more the administration could do for crypto. 'I think by August, we might have achieved the crypto agenda in Washington,' Sacks said onstage Tuesday. 'What would you guys like to see? What else is on your wish list?" Crypto booster Tyler Winklevoss, onstage with Sacks, said the U.S. government should acquire more bitcoin, prompting applause from the audience. Don Jr. and Eric Trump predicted at the conference that bitcoin's price would keep rising to record highs. And Vance, who said he still owns bitcoin that he's held for years, urged conference attendees to get involved in politics including the 2026 midterm elections, or else face a potential crackdown by crypto skeptics. 'Don't ignore politics, because I guarantee you, my friends, politics is not going to ignore this community,' Vance said. Panel moderators did not raise the subject of the $TRUMP meme coin onstage with Sacks, the Trump brothers or others from Trump world. The subject appeared not to come up at all in the conference's official programming, even though many attendees had closely followed news about the coin with concern. Some bitcoin holders said that the depth of the Trump-crypto alliance made them a little uncomfortable. They noted that bitcoin was invented in 2008 to be independent of any government or other central authority. 'The people that are in politics are kind of the bandwagoners,' said Dustin Lee, a conference attendee who said he's been working in crypto for eight years and has his own meme coin, called Quai Boss. He said he was OK with the politicians' presence, though. 'We need the stragglers to get into the space, to bring on the rest of the people,' he said. Geiger said that although she likes Trump and his policies, she's still pessimistic in general about politicians and their intentions toward bitcoin. 'I don't want to be blindsided. I don't want to be like, 'Oh, everything's all right now, because the orange guy won.' It's not that. Some of the things are moving slowly in a direction I love. But on the whole, politicians are gonna politician. They're gonna do their thing.' David Ingram David Ingram is a tech reporter for NBC News.
CNBC
20 hours ago
- Business
- CNBC
Watch CNBC's full interview with Strategy's Michael Saylor from Bitcoin 2025
Michael Saylor, executive chairman of Strategy, joins CNBC's MacKenzie Sigalos at Bitcoin 2025 to discuss the rise of corporate bitcoin purchases, digital asset regulation and more.
CNBC
21 hours ago
- Business
- CNBC
Stablecoins stole the show at Bitcoin 2025 — here's what the major players said
LAS VEGAS — At the world's largest bitcoin conference this week on the Vegas Strip, the most consequential story wasn't about bitcoin. Stablecoins, the dollar-pegged digital tokens now driving a full-scale financial and political shift in Washington, stole the show. The momentum behind stablecoin legislation and crypto market reform is accelerating — and it's attracting a new kind of donor, investor, and voter. That shift took center stage at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas. Vice President JD Vance became the first sitting U.S. vice president to address the bitcoin community on Wednesday, delivering a full-throated endorsement of crypto. "I think it's wrong, actually, to call this just a conference," Vance told a crowd of 35,000. "This is a movement. And I'm proud to stand with you." "In this administration, we do not think that stablecoins threaten the integrity of the U.S. dollar. Quite the opposite," said Vance. "We view them as a force multiplier of our economic might." Stablecoins are designed to have a stable value against a non-crypto asset, usually the U.S. dollar. "We're streamlining payment rails for ensuring U.S. dollar global dominance for decades to come," Bo Hines, a White House official heading up the president's Digital Assets Council, told CNBC on the sidelines of Bitcoin 2025. He added that stablecoin integration into the U.S. financial system could unlock trillions of dollars in global demand for American debt. Those ambitions hinge on the passage of the GENIUS Act, a Senate bill that would establish the first comprehensive regulatory framework for stablecoin issuers. Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., told the Bitcoin 2025 crowd that the bill would move to a cloture vote on Monday after weeks of negotiations with Democrats. "We think we have a final deal," Lummis said. "If we can get this passed, this will be the first piece of digital asset legislation to pass the U.S. Senate." On the House side, Republicans are racing to match that pace. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., praised Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., for pushing a "calcified" Senate to act at record speed and said the House is determined to get both the stablecoin and broader market structure bills on President Donald Trump's desk before the August recess. "The president promised this," Emmer said. "We want it done now." Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wisc., who chairs the House Subcommittee on Digital Assets, is leading efforts to advance companion legislation and expects the bill to reach the Financial Services Committee by July. "Stablecoin issuers will be purchasing U.S. Treasuries at a period of time where that is incredibly essential," Steil told CNBC in Vegas. "It enshrines the U.S. dollar in our dominant role as the world's reserve currency." Tether — the largest stablecoin issuer in the world — now ranks among the top buyers of U.S. Treasuries globally. Steil dismissed Democratic efforts to propose an amendment banning government officials from profiting off stablecoin ventures. The Trump family has ties to World Liberty Financial and its newly-launched stablecoin USD1. Kraken CEO Dave Ripley, who has been advising lawmakers behind the scenes, called the legislation essential to bringing financial institutions — including consumer brokers and major banks — into the digital asset ecosystem. But he cautioned that key provisions, including whether yield on stablecoins can be shared with users and how government officials may participate in the market, are still being debated. "Crypto is all about individuals," he said. "Let's bring the value to them." Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said commodity trading firms will be "the biggest driver" of stablecoin adoption in the next five years. He is already preparing for the next wave of competition as mainstream financial players begin launching their own digital dollars on the blockchain. Ardoino, whose company controls more than 60% of the stablecoin market, emphasized that traditional financial firms entering the stablecoin space will be constrained by their reliance on high-fee customers. "All the traditional financial firms will create stablecoins that will be offered to their existing customers," he told CNBC. According to The Wall Street Journal, major banks including JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citi are in early talks to issue a unified digital dollar to compete with Tether. Tether, by contrast, is targeting the global majority excluded from banking. "Many of our competitors say, 'Oh, Tether is serving this niche of the unbanked,'" he said. "Half of the population of the world should not be called a niche." That global reach is one reason policymakers in Washington are moving fast. Under Trump's newly appointed regulatory team, momentum has shifted decisively. The Securities and Exchange Commission, which has been long viewed as the industry's top adversary, has begun dismantling its enforcement-first framework, clearing the way for greater institutional participation in crypto. SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said the change was long overdue. "For many years now, I've been complaining about the fact that the commission has not taken proactive steps to provide clarity, and now finally, we're at a place where we can do that," she said. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, who has been meeting privately with the SEC, says tokenization — not just of dollars, but of public and private markets — is now within reach, even without new legislation. "We've actually been engaging with the SEC crypto task force as well as the administration," he told CNBC. "And it's our belief, actually, that we don't even need congressional action to make tokenization real. The SEC can just do it."
